September Goals

My September Goals are as follow:

1) Make the September Color Bee Shocked Block - Kris sent some lovely fabrics, so I'm excited

2) Finish piecing the top for the first Low Volume Baby Quilt. Right now it's 8x6, and I would like it to be at least 10x8.

3) Make at least one or two house blocks for the "Quilt for a Friend" project.

Stretch Goals:
1) Surprise wedding quilt - I really should be working on this exclusively, but I cannot seem to get myself motivated to do so.
2) Work on the Christmas quilt which has been sadly neglected with all these other projects
3) Keep cutting fabrics for the second Low Volume Baby Quilt and start piecing some of the HSTs

That will be more than enough for this month, but I doubt I'll stick to those specific projects as I always have new ideas and plenty of fabric.

HST Baby Quilt

So I am not entirely sure how this happened, but I apparently never blogged about this quilt finish.

I'm especially surprised since it was my very first commissioned quilt. Since it was for family (my husband's aunt to be exact), I just charged for materials and contributed the labor free of charge as my portion of the present. The quilt was for my husband's cousin who was expecting a baby. My only real challenge was to keep things cost effective. So I ended up using a single charm pack, about a yard of Kona Snow, 2 yards of one of the fabrics from the charm pack line (Ticklish! by Me & My Sister for Moda) for the backing and binding, and a cut from my roll of batting.

First I turned all the floral prints and circles into HST's, then added in everything else, because I quickly realized that when you start with 5" squares, they get cut down to 4.5" after sewing, and then finished they only end up at 4". That's a loss of a full inch. So I needed the full charm pack to have a decent sized baby quilt, and then it still ended up on the small side.

I didn't do anything fancy with the backing, because I'd used up every last charm square on the front of the quilt.

Total size was an 8 by 10 layout, or 32" by 40". Definitely far smaller than I usually make my baby quilts. Total time to make it was just over a month. I quilted in the ditch along the diamond patterns. After I washed it, it ended up a lot more wrinkled than I wanted it to be, which taught me a lesson in subject pre-shrinking of the batting.

I leave you with this adorable picture of baby Sadie wrapped in my quilt.